Search Ideas

There’s another issue with disregarding ‘small’/‘weak’ criticisms: some criticisms may look small at first, but as you investigate, you realize they’re actually a big deal.

I realized this the other day on the topic of macOS UI bugs during a Twitter space. Somebody said that many of the issues I had pointed out with the new Tahoe OS were just minor UI glitches (in other words: ‘weak criticisms’). But then somebody else pointed out that those are still worrisome because severe security holes, like being able to bypass authentication, have presented as minor UI glitches in the past!

Thanks for clarifying! I changed the text to phrase it as counter-criticize because that's indeed more accurate here.

@dennis-hackethal you have regularly pointed out to me that it’s a mistake to assign strengths or weaknesses to arguments—for example, in #1809 and #1927. I’d love to get to the bottom of that.

On one hand, I see what you mean. A criticism can either be counter-criticized or it can be an unresolved error. If it’s a bad criticism, you just counter-criticize it or deem it irrelevant and move on.

I also see why talking about a “gradient” or comparative strength between arguments is problematic: there’s no objective criterion to measure them against. We can only say one theory is better than another when both attempt to explain the same phenomenon—then we can evaluate them using properties such as hard-to-varyness and other criteria Deutsch describes. (We can get into that if you’d like, though I don’t think that’s our main disagreement.). But this comparison doesn’t apply when we’re dealing with very different criticisms of a single idea, because there’s no common standard to measure them against. Comparing their “strength” becomes arbitrary.

However, I still think there are good and bad criticisms, just as there are good and bad explanations (following Deutsch’s distinction: for instance, bad explanations are easy to vary or point to authorities to justify themselves rather than offering a hard-to-vary account of how and why something works). While I could simply counter-criticize bad criticisms and move on, there’s also the matter of efficiency and opportunity cost: I don’t want to waste time repeatedly countering poor criticisms, or worse, get stuck in circular debates with people who don’t recognize that some arguments aren’t good criticisms at all. I’d rather focus my attention on good criticisms.

To clarify what I mean, here’s an excerpt from my book:

The most important principle to remember while criticizing is: Criticize, don’t defend or attack. Good explanations invite criticism of their intrinsic content—whether the explanation itself works, solves the problem, and avoids worse side effects. Bad explanations, by contrast, deflect criticism onto irrelevant, extrinsic properties such as authority or track record—e.g., “this is the method that successful company X uses,” “I believe strongly in this approach,” or “it’s coming from person Y, so it’s worthless.”

That kind of “criticism” isn’t real criticism at all. It’s just attacking or defending. And when we play that game, the explanation itself stays untouched and stagnant. The idea doesn’t get scrutinized or improved—it only gets shielded or dismissed for irrelevant reasons.

Tagging @bart-vanderhaegen because he and I have discussed this at length—in fact, I got the defending/attacking framing from him.

Well, it’s as you say: if a criticism is bad/weak/whatever, people should argue their case and explain why it’s bad, in the form of a counter-criticism. If the first criticism truly is weak, that should be easy to do. If anyone could just assert that something is bad without giving any reasoning, that would be arbitrary. It would allow them to reject any criticism on whim.

In my understanding, Popper’s epistemology operates on contradiction and non-contradiction. It does not assign strengths or weaknesses. By rejecting justificationism, it rejects positive reasons for preferring one theory over another and instead emphasizes the critical attitude as the only way to make progress. So it does use negative reasons for preferring one theory over another (by rejecting one theory and not another). It looks for reasons against, not reasons for. It seeks to eliminate error.

Speaking of error elimination, Popper’s epistemology does not say to eliminate some errors and ignore others whenever we feel like it. I’m not aware that it makes any distinction between better or worse criticisms. It says to eliminate errors, period.

While I could simply refute bad criticisms and move on, there’s also the matter of efficiency and opportunity cost: I don’t want to waste time repeatedly refuting poor criticisms, or worse, get stuck in circular debates with people who don’t recognize that some arguments aren’t good criticisms at all.

I recently criticized John Horgan’s article about Rat Fest (see #2046) for having misspelled my name. It’s not a big deal; pointing out a typo is arguably one of the ‘weakest’ criticisms there is. But if he now argued with me about the merits of correcting typos, that would take far more time than just correcting it.

While I could simply refute bad criticisms and move on, there’s also the matter of efficiency and opportunity cost: I don’t want to waste time repeatedly refuting poor criticisms, or worse, get stuck in circular debates with people who don’t recognize that some arguments aren’t good criticisms at all.

That’s a fair concern if you’re talking about duplicate criticisms, which public intellectuals do field. The solution here is to publicly write a counter-criticism once and then refer to it again later. It is then on the other party to present some new reasoning or evidence, pending which you don’t need to change your mind or focus any more attention on the matter.

For example, people’s knee-jerk reaction to libertarianism is ‘who would build the roads if there were no government?’ That’s one of the reasons Logan and I wrote the Libertarian FAQ, which answers that question. We can now just link to that whenever it comes up.

If you’re talking about new criticisms, however, I think you should address and not dismiss them.

Just a clarification because you seem to be fudging refutation and criticism:

A refutation is an explanation for why something cannot be true, ie must be false. For example, some guy claims his grandfather fought in WW2. But you checked his birth certificate and he was born in 1950. So he couldn’t have fought in WW2.

A criticism just points out some shortcoming. It could be any shortcoming, even something as small as a typo.

Any refutation is also a criticism, but not every criticism is a refutation.

Well, it’s as you say: if a criticism is bad/weak/whatever, people should argue their case and explain why they think it’s bad, in the form of a counter-criticism. If it’s truly weak, that should be easy to do. If anyone could just assert that something is bad without giving any reasoning, that would be arbitrary. It would allow them to reject any criticism on whim.

In my understanding, Popper’s epistemology operates on contradiction and non-contradiction. It does not assign strengths or weaknesses. By rejecting justificationism, it rejects positive reasons for preferring one theory over another and instead emphasizes the critical attitude as the only way to make progress. So it does use negative reasons for preferring one theory over another (by rejecting one theory and not another). It looks for reasons against, not reasons for. It seeks to eliminate error.

Can you be skeptical without falling into self-contradiction, like Popper and Kuhn?

Popper was not a skeptic. Skepticism, as an epistemology, says there can be no genuine knowledge. Popper opposed skepticisism.

Chipkin urges me to come to Rat (short for rationalism) Fest…

It’s technically true that the “Rat” part of Rat Fest is short for ‘rationalism’, but I’ve always considered it to be short for Crit Rat, ie Critical Rationalism. This matters because it’s not a rationalist conference, neither in the Less Wrong sense nor in the rationalism vs empiricism sense.

This distinction matters because later on, Horgan writes:

Why do self-proclaimed rationalists often seem so wacky?

And he means the attendees of Rat Fest. But they’re not rationalists!

Not at all, Deutsch replies. We are fallible, he reminds me, that means we make mistakes. Civilizations have taken wrong turns in the past and collapsed, that can happen again. But Deutsch thinks things will work out. American scientists can come to Europe to continue their research, and maybe not all the research should continue.

I think this passage misses a key epistemological insight Deutsch shared in response to Horgan’s worries about Trump: a society that’s free to make mistakes sometimes makes bigger mistakes than one that isn’t. What matters is that the society retains the ability to correct those mistakes (which ours does retain).

Overall, I don’t share Horgan’s impression that Rat Fest is “cult-y”. Yes, fans of Deutsch aren’t critical enough of him, but that alone doesn’t rise to the level of a cult.

For instance, many people at Rat Fest know that I am critical of Deutsch, and if it was an actual cult, they wouldn’t have welcomed me with open arms.

Also, having once been tricked into joining a cult, and then worked for years to escape its fangs, I know a cult when I see one. Rat Fest is not one. Actual cults want to control your life even after you leave, thereby violating your freedom of association – that doesn’t happen at Rat Fest.

Popper himself, when I interviewed him in 1992, was a comically dogmatic denouncer of dogmatism. He kept insisting he was right and his critics wrong.

When I told Popper a former student accused him of not tolerating criticism, he responded: “It is completely untrue! I was happy when I got criticism! Of course, not when I would answer the criticism… and the person would still go on with it.” Then Popper would eject the student from the class.

Ejecting the student seems over the top. But there’s a difference between openness to criticism and relativism. If you address a criticism but the critic just continues as if you hadn’t, I can see how that’s frustrating. If there’s no new reasoning or evidence to the contrary, I think it’s fine to “insist[]” that you are right and your critics wrong. It’s possible to determine that objectively. That’s not dogma – it’s integrity.

The claim that Deutsch “repeatedly appeals to Popper’s authority” in BoI should be accompanied by evidence. Like, Horgan should quote some passage from BoI that he thinks is an appeal to Popper’s authority.

Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity suffers from this problem, too. Deutsch rejects appeals to authority but repeatedly appeals to Popper’s authority.

Same issue as in #2052: I don’t think Deutsch ever appeals to Popper’s authority. Deutsch ‘just’ thinks Popper is right, and so he quotes/refers to him. Also, recall that Deutsch criticizes Popper’s criterion of demarcation in chapter 1 as being insufficient:

Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science.

Nevertheless, testability cannot have been the decisive factor in the scientific revolution either.

A key tenet of critical rationalism is that knowledge is tentative, improvable, because all of us are fallible, we can never be sure we’re right. But Rat Festers cite Popper and Deutsch as if they are infallible.

My impression is that, when they cite Popper and Deutsch, they consider their citations unproblematic, ie background knowledge shared with other attendees – to an outsider, that can look like an appeal to authority.

Horgan writes several passages about Rat Fest being “cult-y”:

[W]hy do I call Rat Fest “cult-y”?

Because what binds this band of rebels together is veneration for Popper and Deutsch. Five folks give talks on physics, and all seem to assume as axiomatic that the many-worlds interpretation is true. Why? Because Deutsch says it’s true.

I partly agree but also disagree.

My impression is that there is a mixture of Deutsch fans. Some – and I think that includes the physicists – came to their own reflected conclusion that Many Worlds is the theory to adopt. Others couldn’t possibly do that because they don’t have the requisite physics knowledge; they probably defer to the experts.

I have had discussions with some fans of Deutsch where I was interested in getting to the truth of some matter whereas they were more interested in quoting Deutsch, as if that settled the debate.

Sometimes, I remind fans of Deutsch that they need to decide between merely socializing around his ideas and actually applying them, which includes being critical of him. After all, listening to music, talking about music, going to concerts, etc are all different from actually making music!

Full disclosure: I used to be one of Deutsch’s biggest fans but have since become one of his bigger critics, as evidenced by some articles such as this one and this one. I have also published criticisms of some of Popper’s ideas, though I think on the whole my view of Popper is more favorable than my view of Deutsch.

… My students are using AI to do their thinking for them.

Generally speaking, people who have properly functioning minds enjoy thinking about things they are interested in and use tools to outsource toil and other things they are not interested in.

They would not want to use those tools to spend less time doing things they do enjoy. If Horgan’s students are using AI, that means they are not interested in whatever he teaches them. (That isn’t necessarily an indictment of Horgan – people often go to school not because it interests them but because they think they should.)

In this sense – and similar to what Horgan says Brett Hall pointed out to him – AI is more like a calculator allowing mathematicians to focus on what really matters: using their creativity to find new proofs, theorems, etc (I’m not a mathematician, but I imagine that’s what they do).

… My students are using AI to do their thinking for them.

Generally speaking, people who have properly functioning minds enjoy thinking about things they are interested in and use tools to outsource toil and other things they are not interested in.

They would not want to use those tools to spend less time doing things they do enjoy. If Horgan’s students are using AI, that means they are not interested in whatever he teaches them. (That isn’t necessarily an indictment of Horgan – people often go to school not because it interests them but because they think they should.)

In this sense, AI is more like a calculator allowing mathematicians to focus on what really matters: using their creativity to find new proofs, theorems, etc (I’m not a mathematician, but I imagine that’s what they do).

If you give your students an exam on disobediance…

Typo: disobedience

Dennis Hackenthal weighs the relative merits of “patches” versus “purges,” meaning incremental political reforms versus revolutions. Hackenthal asks Rat Festers which they prefer. More hands go up for incremental reform. Popper was an incrementalist, and, well, revolutions can get messy.

I don’t recall asking. The central thesis of my talk was that Popper’s advocacy of gradual improvement doesn’t work in certain fundamental matters, ie matters which allow no room for compromise because even the slightest deviation from the ideal means utter surrender of the underlying principle. https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/reason-by-purge-or-by-patch

Oh and it’s Hackethal btw :) No ‘n’.

Lulie Tanett, wearing a “Beginning of Infinity” t-shirt, suggests you can use reason to pinpoint and overcome hidden, irrational fears. So… critical rationalism can help you be your own psychotherapist?

Did she refer to reason? My impression lately is that she repurposes Deutsch’s distinction between explicit thought on the one hand and inexplicit/unconscious (“hidden”) thought on the other to repackage and rebrand Kant’s marriage of reason and unreason.

Over three days Rat Festers give more than 30 talks, most just 15 minutes long, on [several topics including] objectivism (Ayn Rand’s schtick)…

My macOS Dictionary app says for schtick: “a gimmick, comic routine, style of performance, etc. associated with a particular person…”

Calling Objectivism, a serious philosophy developed over decades that has influenced millions to live a life guided by reason, a “schtick”, as if Rand had never had any serious intentions with it, is dismissive and insulting.

But if Horgan has any legitimate criticisms of Objectivism, I want to know. (I have some, too!)

Chipkin urges me to come to Rat (short for rationalism) Fest…

It’s technically true that the “Rat” part of Rat Fest is short for rationalism, but I’ve always considered it to be short for Crit Rat, ie Critical Rationalism. This matters because it’s not a rationalist conference, neither in the Less Wrong sense nor in the rationalism vs empiricism sense.

Science writer John Horgan wrote his own article about his experience at Rat Fest:
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/my-weekend-at-rat-fest